Critical Thinking

Dear LREI Community,

I hope this note finds you well.

In our ongoing efforts to be open and inclusive of a range of beliefs and values, I offer the following.

A couple of weeks ago one of our better known graduates, Angela Davis ’61, was in the news when in response to the complaints of members of a local organization in her home town of Birmingham, AL another organization withdrew an honor it had planned to bestow on her. The concerns/complaints expressed had to do with Ms. Davis’ politics and points-of-view and the interpretation of her viewpoints remain in dispute. (Additional specifics of this controversy are easily Googleable.) I tweeted about this controversy for a couple of reasons. Ms. Davis’ response to the controversy noted her time at the school. She wrote on Facebook, “Through my experiences at Elizabeth Irwin High School in New York City and at Brandeis University in the late fifties and early sixties, and my subsequent time in graduate school in Frankfurt, Germany, I learned to be as passionate about opposition to antisemitism as to racism.” I also carry with me a comment she made at a conference at which I was fortunate enough to introduce her. She said, something along the lines of, “Attending a progressive independent school fundamentally changed the trajectory of my life.” Angela’s time at LREI was impactful.

Another alum, from the same era, has also been in the news recently.

“The EI I attended in the 1960s had a reputation for social and political activism, but it was precisely in these areas that it failed its students. The political bias, not only among the students but much worse in the actual teaching of history and “social studies,” was pronounced, even scandalous. We were taught hypercritical thinking when it came to the United States, and uncritical acceptance of the pieties of the Left.

But, EI was spectacular when it came to the humanities and the teaching of culture…EI taught us French, introduced us to theater, started us writing. No classes I took at EI have proved more valuable than Ed Suvanto’s English classes, where we learned to read great literature thoughtfully and critically, and learned to write…by writing, getting his comments and writing more. Here in the humanities, every advantage of a small independent school was manifest.  

I hope the old Leftism has departed now, with the Cold War, leaving EI to nurture an appreciation of Western culture and of independent thinking about politics.”

Elliott Abrams ’65, who has been a member of the State Department in several administrations, and a little over a week ago was appointed the Special Envoy on Venezuela, shared these reminiscences on the occasion of the school’s 50th Anniversary. Clearly some strong concerns about his time here, along with a strong impact.

Angela Davis’ and Elliott Abrams’ paths to LREI could not have been more different.  (If you are interested in how they each arrived at LREI, you can read more about these two lives, and that of Elliott’s classmate Tom Hurwitz, in Dina Hampton’s (LREI ’77), Little Red: Three Passionate Lives through the Sixties and Beyond.) These two students, here during the same era, had overlapping though significantly different experiences at LREI. I wonder what the impact was, or would have been, at the time to have acknowledged the fact that one student arrived from his long-time home in Queens and the other joined in tenth grade, having moved away from family to NYC, though both felt dissonance with the culture of the school? How would some understanding of their biographical, cultural, racial differences, have impacted their experiences? What challenges did they share? Interesting. Maybe I will invite them to return to 40 Charlton Street to discuss this.